Jim McGill 05 The Devil on the Doorstep

by Joseph Flynn

  “More than one,” DeWitt said.

  “How quickly can you have your best one get to my office?”

  “Twenty minutes, if you can make it by then.”

  McGill looked at the bedside clock. It was five-fifteen a.m. Still dark as midnight.

  In her first term, Patti used to rise at four-thirty. After reelection, though, she’d pushed that back to six-thirty, a move of which McGill approved wholeheartedly. Sleeping through your presidency, he thought, was possibly the best way to survive it. Just ask Ronald Reagan.

  He told DeWitt, “Make it forty-five minutes. I’ll see you and your art expert.”

  McGill had beat his own deadline by five minutes. Leo was parked at the curb downstairs reading Car and Driver and drinking coffee. Deke stood guard in the outer office, probably thinking of the new carpet and drapes he’d get for the office once he took over.

  Sweetie was, with any luck, embarking on her first full day of motherhood.

  Knuckles tapped at McGill’s door. Deke opened it and said, “FBI.”

  McGill nodded and DeWitt entered his office. Closed the door behind him.

  “Your art expert is outside?” McGill asked.

  “He is, but he’s not cleared to see or hear what I have to show you.”

  “Fair enough,” McGill said. “Have a seat.”

  DeWitt took a guest chair. He laid his attaché case on his lap and took an iPad from it.

  “You’re familiar with this, how to use it?”

  McGill said, “Each of my kids has one. They’ve taken me through the basics.”

  DeWitt handed the tablet to McGill. Before he delved into Apple’s latest marvel, he looked at the deputy director and asked, “Are you going to catch any grief for talking with me?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not concerned if I do. My focus when we met the other day was too narrow. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Not a problem. For me anyway. You’re sure you’ll be okay talking to me?”

  DeWitt took a moment to choose his words with care. “I have a fairly rare skill set. It occurred to me I might do better working as a contractor to the government rather than being a part of the chain of command.”

  McGill grinned. “That’s what I thought, too, when the president was first elected. I’d be better off on my own than becoming a fed.”

  “I can see that,” DeWitt said, “I haven’t made a final decision yet, but I have one foot out the door and I’m leaning that way.”

  “In the meantime, you’ll stay true to who you are.”

  “Yes, I will.” He gestured to the iPad. “That video on the screen is my latest interview with Elvie Fisk. We finished just a little over an hour ago. She thinks her father had betrayed her. We didn’t tell her about the threat he made against your children. We’re holding her in isolation so there’s no chance the news will leak to her. She said a couple interesting things in this latest go-round. I’ll let you see what they are for yourself.”

  McGill tapped the screen and the interview video began to play.

  He was stunned by how young the kid on the screen looked.

  DeWitt saw his surprise and interpreted it correctly. “She’s seventeen,” he said. “We’ve verified that. Don’t know if her petite frame is genetic or a matter of nutritional deficiency.”

  McGill nodded. He replayed the part he’d missed listening to DeWitt.

  “The first thing you bastards better look out for is AR-13,” Elvie said.

  “Why’s that?” DeWitt asked.

  “You know how it is with us real Americans. We like our guns. We love that the law is on our side about keeping them.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Well, that woman is gonna be outside when she gives her little speech, isn’t she?”

  DeWitt said, “You mean the president, when she takes her oath outdoors?”

  “Right. Now, what that court says is Americans have the right to carry their weapons with them when they go about their business. Drop your gun in your pocket. Stick it in a holster under your coat, you’re good to go. You also get to bring your guns into national parks now. And that grassy stretch of ground right next to where that woman is gonna speak? That’s a national park.”

  Elvie showed DeWitt a cunning smile.

  “How about that?” she said. “Bet you feds forgot that.”

  “We know that the National Mall is part of the park system.”

  “Yeah? Did you also know that ten thousand members of AR-13 plan to show up packing heat? If the local cops try to give them any shit about moving up close enough to make themselves heard, they better have those boys outnumbered. Outgunned too. They’re gonna bring more than six-shooters, I’ll tell you that.”

  McGill thought DeWitt had kept a fine poker face in light of that warning.

  “What else might they bring?” the deputy director asked. “Something that Arlo Carsten might have had a hand in?”

  Elvie shook her head, as if she were disappointed.

  But not by DeWitt.

  “You know, Arlo is so book smart it almost made my head hurt. He’s sent people into outer space and brought them back again. He was real proud of that. Everybody he sent up came back down again in one piece. But if you closed the book he had his nose buried in, Arlo was more like a junior high kid than a grown man. I mean, I had him dancing to my tune, and there’s not enough meat on my bones to interest any man who should be looking for a grown woman.”

  “Maybe he likes you for yourself,” DeWitt said.

  Elvie offered a mirthless laugh in response. “That’s what I thought for a while, too. Then I heard he actually got some hot old lady to talk with him in some bar. That was it for me. He’s just another asshole like my old man.”

  “So how did Arlo plan to help AR-13 or whoever else might be involved?”

  “That’s just the thing. He wasn’t working with the other guys. He palled around with them some. But he worked in this building all off on his own. Nobody but dear old Daddy and one or two other guys got to go in there with him.”

  “Did you ever hear your father speak of anything he and Arlo talked about?”

  Elvie scrunched up her face.

  “What’s wrong?” DeWitt said.

  “I did hear this one thing Daddy said, but it made no sense at all.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said something about Arlo working on hard pee. I know everybody’s gotta pee hard now and then, but what the hell is hard pee?”

  The video ended with a puzzled expression draped over Elvie’s pointed features and the question left hanging.

  McGill looked at DeWitt. “And the answer is?”

  “The consensus of the technical people who’ve seen the video thus far is Elvie misunderstood her father’s words. He said harpy, as in the mythological monster with the head of a woman and the body of a bird of prey.”

  It took a moment, but McGill made the leap.

  “Bird of prey as in a drone?”

  DeWitt bobbed his head. “Israel makes a drone called the Harpy. It can hover and attack pre-emptively. No human decision-maker needed.”

  “How the hell does that happen?” McGill asked.

  “It’s programmed to recognize and attack any radar signal that isn’t included in its database as belonging to friendly forces.”

  McGill said, “There will be radar watching over the inaugural, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How close will any part of it be to the president?”

  “You’ll have to ask the Secret Service about that.”

  McGill pressed a hand to his eyes, as if struck by a blinding headache.

  “Please tell me the Israelis keep this weapon to themselves.”

  “They’ve sold it to China, India and South Korea. Whether any of those countries have resold it elsewhere, we’re not sure.”

  “Jesus Christ,” McGill whispered, looking at the deputy director.

  DeWitt told him, “I
’m sorry to say, things get worse.”

  “How could they?”

  The deputy director reached into his attaché case again. He brought out a small audio recorder. Put it on McGill’s desk. DeWitt said, “This was delivered to FBI headquarters by a courier who is still being questioned.” He hit play.

  The two men listened to the voice of Senator Howard Hurlbert, who had fallen one vote short of becoming president. He spoke of assassinating the woman who had edged him out.

  Ile de la Cité — Paris

  Gabbi had worked so far into the night that she could do no more that stumble to the sofa she kept in her studio. She remembered falling in the direction of its cushions but had no recall of landing on them. Losing consciousness in mid-air, she thought, was not a habit to be cultivated. To emphasize that point, she awoke with a sore neck. She had a fuzzy head, too, though she hadn’t had anything stronger than water to drink.

  She seemed to recall that she’d made a good deal of progress last night. Was close on the heels of the notorious art thief Laurent Fortier. Catching that bastard would be a major coup for any investigator, much less one who had retired to daub oil paints onto stretched canvas.

  She needed to clear her head before she could be sure she wasn’t kidding herself about how successful she’d been. She grabbed the notes she’d made from the art table where she’d done her research. Took the flash drives and the sealed envelope, too. She went downstairs to her apartment, put everything into her safe. She’d never had a break-in. Likely never would with the security system Gianni had installed, but she was taking no chances.

  She stepped into the shower stall and bracing herself turned on a torrent of cold water. She endured it for thirty seconds, until her head was clear and her teeth chattered. She moderated the water temperature, brought it up to warm and then bearably hot. The contrast to the previous chill made the heated water all the more pleasurable. Her mind was not only sharp now it functioned in top form.

  The first conclusion she reached was she should stop crapping around and rip open the envelope Gaspar Lambert had given her. There was only one reason the archivist would have been bribed by anyone. To gain access to something that was restricted to legitimate scholars.

  Wait a minute, Gabbi thought. Her basic assumption was that Fortier had an academic background, that he used it for personal gain instead of publishing his findings for public benefit. So why would he need to bribe M’sieur Lambert or anyone else? Well, she and Jim McGill had surmised that the name of Laurent Fortier comprised more than a one-man operation.

  Okay, but for what possible reason would Lambert reveal to Gabbi that he’d accepted a bribe if he knew he was helping the most famous art thief in modern times?

  There wasn’t any reason that good. Doing a favor, even for someone very important to Lambert, didn’t cut it. So, what was the answer?

  Gabbi got out of the shower, dried herself and threw on an ensemble of old sweat clothes and pink sneakers. Her hair still damp, she retrieved her papers and the sealed envelope, sat down in her living room and reread her notes. One of the flash drives Lambert had given her listed the names of every legitimate scholar who had done research on masters of the Impressionist movement at the Musée d’Orsay over the past twenty-five years. That was the known span of Laurent Fortier’s working career.

  The number of researchers was legion and their distribution was global.

  Matching the scholars with the artists and the works of art that were the focus of their research — the other flash drive held images of the relevant paintings — had taken all night and well into the wee hours. Just before she collapsed, Gabbi had winnowed the horde down to six names, all men with proper university affiliations and credentials. None of them, however, had published any learned articles, speeches, monographs or books on the subjects of their research. That raised the question she’d also voiced to Jim McGill.

  Why do the grunt work if you didn’t reap the professional glory?

  The answer, of course, was because the greater reward lay elsewhere.

  Stealing paintings that were worth millions of dollars. Or euros. Or any denomination you cared to name.

  The idea hadn’t occurred to Gabbi last night in the fog of her fatigue but now she thought maybe fate had intruded on the scholarly imperative to publish, perish or steal. The Grim Reaper might have come along and put an end to the best laid plans. Gabbi pulled up the Internet on her desktop computer and ran searches on the six names on her list.

  Three of the men had died within a year of doing their research at the Musée d’Orsay. Given the pace at which scholarly writing proceeded, they were probably still busy composing their first outlines when mortality overtook them. One fellow died in an automobile accident. The other two had begun their research only after they’d been diagnosed with cancer. Either their prognoses had been overly optimistic or they’d chosen to die doing what they loved best.

  A fourth scholar suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease. The illness had progressed to the point where simply getting through the day was a massive feat. Writing and publishing were no longer possible. Gabbi had to infer that even making the attempt to take on a new intellectual task must have been a heroic effort for the man.

  That left only two names on Gabbi’s list: René Simonet and Albrecht Hoffman.

  Gabbi searched the Net for Hoffman first. She found photos of the man without any problem. He appeared to be somewhere in his fifties. Not the peak age for physical fitness, but Hoffman didn’t look like he’d been an athlete at any point in his life. He was tall and emaciated, all long, bony limbs, hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. The only flesh on the man that Gabbi could see was the bulb at the end of his nose.

  His unlikely appearance made it more than difficult for Gabbi to imagine him as a cat burglar whose exploits had grown to mythical proportions. Why he didn’t publish the results of his research, she couldn’t say. A political knifing by a superior at his university? A house fire that claimed years of preparatory work? A drinking problem?

  Something. Maybe. But she didn’t like him as her bad guy.

  René Simonet didn’t look like much either. About the same age as Hoffman, maybe even a year or two older. A cap of tight gray curls sat atop a nondescript face whose most striking feature was the gold wire-rim glasses he wore. A good foot shorter than Hoffman, he wouldn’t cast a very long shadow. He was also thin, but not skeletal. More wiry. Maybe even strong.

  Peering more closely at Simonet, Gabbi whispered, “Damn.”

  You wanted somebody who was nondescript, who’d fade from memory in the blink of an eye, who’d literally be able to lose himself in a crowd of people of normal height, he’d be your man. If he were as strong as she was coming to think he might be, he’d be able to clamber up a downspout quick as a simian, slip through narrow spaces, hide behind a sapling.

  Unless her imagination was getting the better of her, Gabbi thought the guy would make a great thief. To cover her bases, though, she captured images of both Hoffman and Simonet. She put them into an email and sent it off to Père Louvel in Avignon.

  She called the good father, too, in case he was the kind who didn’t check his email ten times a day. He answered the call on the first ring.

  “Father, it’s me, Gabbi Casale. I just sent you an email with pictures of two men. I think one of them is the man you and Magistrate Pruet are looking for. Will you please forward the photos to your family’s network of friends around France and ask if anyone remembers seeing either of them just prior to the time a family in the area might have lost a prized possession?”

  That had been her bargain with Père Louvel. She wouldn’t ask the name of the family or of the artist whose work was stolen. But if the locals had noticed a stranger in their midst, and they always did in small towns, she would get a fix on which one of these men had come to be known as Laurent Fortier.

  Her money was on Simonet.

  She hated to think think h
er whole theory was wrong and it was neither of them.

  Père Louvel told her he’d just opened the email and would send it on to the dozens of families the Louvels had contacts with throughout the country. He would let her know immediately if he had any positive responses.

  “Pray that I’m on the right path here, Father,” Gabbi told him.

  He responded, “That is always my prayer, ma chère, for everyone.”

  Gabbi said good-bye and her eyes fell on the sealed envelope.

  If Simonet was her man, why would he have had to pay Lambert a bribe?

  He was either a legitimate academic or someone who had been able to pass himself off as one. He’d gotten into Lambert’s offices through the front door. Why should he have to enter through the back door?

  Gabbi got hungry before she could come up with the answer. She’d slept too late to bother with breakfast. Monsieur Henri, the restaurant downstairs, served lunch. She called down to the kitchen and asked for saumon fumé — smoked salmon — and a green salad. A glass of wine as well. When your kid brother had bankrolled the chef, you got carryout when no one else could.

  Even so, when the kitchen had just opened, you had to wait a few minutes.

  Gabbi’s stomach started to growl before then. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt such strong pangs of hunger. That was when it hit her.

  What if Simonet had been sick once upon a time? He wanted to do some research at the museum, but hadn’t been up to it. Hell, three of the four names on her list who hadn’t gotten around to publishing their work had fallen prey to illnesses that had either killed or disabled them. So why not Simonet, too? Not to the same extent maybe, but long enough to put him off his game for a while.

  If he was determined to find some nugget of information, he might have sent someone, who didn’t have his academic credentials, to the museum to learn something for him. That layman might have needed to grease his way past Lambert with a bribe.

  For his part, the archivist wouldn’t have thought he wasn’t doing such a terrible thing. He was merely lending a helping hand to someone who was already approved to do research. But why then had Lambert described the bribe he’d been paid as very large.